Ideas

Remove 'Category Base' From Permalinks

The biggest frustration I've had with WordPress is the inability to remove the 'Category Base' from the url permalink structure. I am not alone. This issue has been raised many times on the Support forums.

Adding this option would really help increase WordPress's acceptance as a viable CMS alternative. As it stands now, if one mixes categories with pages, one comes up with a really illogical url scheme:

To make matters worse, going to http://www.site.com/category/ will result in "Page Not Found". 'Category' is supposed to represent a directory in a website's directory structure!

It seems to me that there is a simple solution. Allow the user to turn off Pages. Without pages, there should be no need for the Category Base prefix. Those that like Pages can continue to use them, those that don't can ditch them.

Completely agree with you nateomedia. As we have started the structuring of our site, we are learning the "hard way" about the limitations of the "category" challenges in WP. We've tried to take advantage of the category base to make for better looking URI's, however, the fact remains that they are still in the "category" slot of the permalink.

Seriously considering just doing away with categoric taxonomy and relying solely on tagging for content structure and navigation.

Well, we gotta be careful there, NateO. Both of those scenarios could very easily be them just using the category base settings in the permalink controls. And I could totally understand them being used simply for the potential indexing power that both "tag" and "site-map" could have in the search engine.

Guess that's the beauty of a php (asp, cmf, whatever) platform/application. You never really know what's behind the curtain (or door number two for that matter. They never picked door number two..:)

the issue here is that it IS inconsistent. i'd rather have posts written as /category-name/post-name/ and therefore moving "one directory higher" we view all posts under category-name, removing the need for "category" in the url. sigh.

Seemed to work perfectly when I tested it. I'd be interested in hearing if anyone discovers other dangers to doing this, other than the obvious potential of collisions between posts, pages, and categories.